Rise of the Warrior Cop (11 page)

Watts burned for six days. The riots were different from the unrest that had broken out on the East Coast in the previous year. For one thing, while Watts could be a rough neighborhood and had some poor areas, it wasn’t the sort of cramped, crushingly poor ghettos found on the East Coast. Though Watts itself was quite small (about one square mile at the time), the riots spread well beyond its boundaries, eventually covering forty-six square miles. And where previous riots had tended to erupt and then persist in fairly concentrated areas, the Watts rioters were disbursed, random, and disorganized. Once Watts exploded on the night of August 11, 1965, the next five nights were a series of quick flashes and slow burns. Violence would die down in parts of the city, only to flare back up in others. Snipers took positions in elevated windows, then tried to pick off cops, firemen, and pedestrians. Looting and arson were rampant. Yet unlike many previous racial riots, no US military troops were sent to Watts. Instead, on the third night, the state dispatched 13,500 California National Guard troops, who remained under the command of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for the duration of the rioting.
¹¹

Frye’s arrest was, of course, only the precipitating incident. The riots were the culmination of years of animosity between black Angelenos and the LAPD administration of Chief William Parker. Black rioters took aim mostly at white cops, motorists, and firemen. Looting was directed mostly at white-owned businesses. Parker didn’t help the situation when he compared the rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.”
¹²
By the time they finally died down, the Watts riots ranked among the most destructive in American history. The rioters caused $40 million in losses, damaged or destroyed one thousand buildings, and left more than one thousand injured and thirty-four dead. At least four thousand people were arrested.

In a couple of ways, the Watts riots were the first major incident to nudge the United States toward more militaristic policing. First, Watts made middle America begin to fear crime as never before. Much of white, middle-class America spent five nights watching their TVs as black people looted and burned their own neighborhoods.
To them, Watts and the riots in Baltimore, Newark, Washington, and Detroit in the following years were signs of a rising criminal class that was increasingly out of control. The political clout of what Nixon would a few years later call “the Silent Majority” would influence a generation of crime policy geared toward giving police more power, more authority, and permission to use more force.

But Watts also had a more direct consequence. The LAPD’s point man during the riots was thirty-nine-year-old inspector Daryl Gates, who had been ascending the ranks of the LAPD like a Gemini pilot. The riots left Gates feeling that police training and tactics at the time were inadequate to address the sort of threat posed by the snipers, rioting, and violence he witnessed in Watts. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” Gates writes in his autobiography. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. . . . Guns were pointed out of second-story windows, random shots fired. . . . It was random chaos, in small disparate patches. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare. Rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all directions.”
¹³

At the time, the US military’s foe in Vietnam was using real guerrilla warfare. So Gates thought to ask the military for guidance. There he found not only the tactics and training he thought could help put down the next wave of rioting, but also the inklings of what would become his most enduring legacy.

Gates would create a phenomenon that over the course of his career would reach virtually every city in America. It would change the face, the mind-set, and the culture of US policing from the late 1960s on, through today, and probably into the foreseeable future.

He started America’s first SWAT team.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1953, P
RESIDENT
D
WIGHT
E
ISENHOWER
nominated Earl Warren to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. He’d later call it one of his greatest mistakes. Warren was a former district attorney, attorney general, and three-term governor of
California. He was also the federal official who oversaw the internment of Japanese Americans in California during World War II. He seemed an unlikely candidate to build a consensus on the Court to protect the rights of the accused—which probably made his critics all the angrier when he did.

The first major criminal justice decision from the Warren Court was
Mapp v. Ohio
in 1961. Police in Cleveland suspected that Dollree Mapp had some evidence hidden in her house related to a bombing and a gambling ring. When she refused to let them in, they showed a fake warrant, forced their way inside, and searched her home. They didn’t find the evidence they were looking for, but they did find some illegal pornography. She was arrested, charged, and convicted. The police never did produce a search warrant. The Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizures applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. And under the 1914 case
Weeks v. United States
, evidence seized in an illegal search could not be used at trial. Police in every jurisdiction in the country were now obligated to uphold the Fourth Amendment.
¹⁴

The next year the Court found in
Robinson v. California
that incarcerating someone merely for being addicted to drugs is a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
¹⁵
Two big cases followed in 1963. In
Gideon v. Wainwright
the Court ruled that states are obligated to pay for an attorney for indigent defendants,
¹⁶
and in
Brady v. Maryland
it ruled that prosecutors must turn over exculpatory or mitigating evidence to defendants when the evidence is material to guilt or to the defendant’s sentence.
¹⁷

In 1964 the Warren Court ruled that suspects have the right to an attorney, not just at trial, but during police interrogations as well.
¹⁸
The famous
Miranda
decision came in 1966, which held that police must notify suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, and to be represented by an attorney.
¹⁹
The decision was widely derided by conservatives. It wasn’t particularly popular with the general public either. It quickly became a rallying cry for the law-and-order crowd, who were appalled at the notion that the
police could be required to tell suspects that they weren’t obligated to answer their questions.

The Warren Court’s final controversial decision, at least from the law-and-order side, was
Katz v. United States
in 1967.
²⁰
In that case, the Court expanded the Fourth Amendment’s protections from “unreasonable search and seizure” to the broader standard of “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” In practical terms, the Fourth Amendment would no longer be limited to physical intrusions. If law enforcement officials wanted to tap a phone, for example, they would need to get a search warrant.

Critics of the Warren Court blamed its decisions at least in part for the rise in crime that began in the mid-1960s. William F. Buckley called
Miranda
a “venture in abstractionist imperialism” and noted that “already the reports are coming in from the police commissioners who are, not so quietly, despairing.”
²¹
Conservative columnist James Kilpatrick wrote that the Warren Court was “often pleased to turn the Constitution into wax.”
²²
And it wasn’t just conservative intellectuals. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
wrote after
Miranda
that “it would be a pity, at a time of increased lawlessness, if more attention is given to the rights of lawbreakers than the rights of the public to have effective police protection.” The Columbia, South Carolina, newspaper
The State
opined that the Court “wrapped its flowing robes around all prisoners so as to virtually immunize them” from police interrogations. The
Richmond Times-Dispatch
was blunter still, calling the Court “an ally of the criminal elements in America.”
²³

Ironically, the Warren Court’s last controversial criminal justice decision actually expanded police authority.
Terry v. Ohio
was also arguably the decision that would have the most impact on the criminal justice system. In 1968 the Court ruled that police officers can stop, detain, and frisk someone based on no more than “reasonable suspicion” that the person is engaged in criminal activity or about to commit a crime. The vote was 8–1. In the coming years, more conservative Supreme Court lineups would expand the window that the Warren Court created in
Terry
. “Stop and frisk”
would become a widely used, highly controversial, often abused police tactic.
²⁴

The Warren Court’s more controversial decisions are still contentiously debated today. In his book
Breaking Rank
, former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper calls the rulings “the ones that most often piss off the cops.”
²⁵
Current Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas continue to express doubts about both
Miranda
and the Exclusionary Rule, which holds that evidence obtained through illegal searches and interrogations can’t be used against a defendant at trial. Current chief justice John Roberts argued against both for much of his career, and legal pundits have speculated that the Court may continue to water down or even overturn one or both during his tenure.
²⁶

But ultimately, Eisenhower’s appointment may have served the law-and-order right better than he could have known before his death in 1969. Although the Warren Court’s legacy unquestionably granted new protections to criminal suspects, it also gave conservative politicians a villain to rail against—and run against. The Court’s controversial decisions spurred a generation-long anticrime backlash that countered its decisions with policies that gave police more power, more discretion, and more authority to use more force.

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING OF
A
UGUST
11, 1966, C
HARLES
Whitman—an Eagle Scout, an ex-Marine, and a former altar boy—went to his mother’s apartment and shot her in the back of the head. He then returned to his own apartment and stabbed his wife to death. He left a note in which he explained that because he loved the two women, he had no choice but to kill them. He wanted to spare them the embarrassment of what was to come.
²⁷

Whitman had been experiencing changes in his behavior for months. He had seen a university psychiatrist, and during a single two-hour session confessed that he was having violent impulses with increasing frequency, and felt less and less able to suppress them. Dr. Maurice Dean Heatly described in his notes a man who was “oozing
with hostility.” Whitman relayed a fantasy about “going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.”

After killing his wife and mother, Whitman did exactly that. He packed a footlocker with sandwiches, gasoline, three rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, two handguns, water, and enough ammunition for a day at the shooting range. At around 11:00 AM, Whitman rolled the footlocker into an elevator in the clock tower building at the University of Texas at Austin. Posing as a maintenance man, he took the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, just below the clock. There he met fifty-one-year-old receptionist Edna Townsley—and killed her by repeatedly striking her with the butt of a rifle. Whitman hid Townsley’s body as two visitors came down from the tower, then barricaded the exit. He killed two more tourists he found ascending the stairs.